In navigation, dead reckoning (also ded (for deduced) reckoning or DR) is the process of calculating one's current position by using a previously determined position, or fix, and advancing that position based upon known or estimated speeds over elapsed time, and course.
Dead reckoning is subject to cumulative errors. Advances in navigational aids which give accurate information on position, in particular satellite navigation using the Global Positioning System, have made simple dead reckoning by humans obsolete for most purposes. However, inertial navigation systems, which provide very accurate directional information, use dead reckoning and are very widely applied.
By analogy with their navigational use, the words dead reckoning are also used to mean the process of estimating the value of any variable quantity by using an earlier value and adding whatever changes have occurred in the meantime. Often, this usage implies that the changes are not known accurately. The earlier value and the changes may be measured or calculated quantities.
There is speculation on the etymological origin of the term, but no reliable information.
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Famous quotes containing the words dead and/or reckoning:
“Girls blush, sometimes, because they are alive,
Half wishing they were dead to save the shame.
The sudden blush devours them, neck and brow;
They have drawn too near the fire of life, like gnats,
And flare up bodily, wings and all. What then?
Who’s sorry for a gnat ... or girl?”
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–1861)
“With earth’s first clay they did the last man knead,
There of the last harvest sowed the seed,
And what the first morning of creation wrote,
The last dawn of reckoning shall read.”
—Edward Fitzgerald (1809–1883)